Elements of Horror, Part 1Good, Evil, & the Collective Unconscious

Today I am going to start a series of posts on horror as an artistic genre, and not simply a cinematic one. We will be discussing the theoretical elements of horror as they apply to both visual and textual mediums. And sometimes we’ll be addressing these in the same work (e.g. William Peter Blatty’s work as both writer of horror novels and adapter of said novels into cinema).

As an artistic genre horror, even in its purely materialistic forms (e.g. teenage slasher movies), involves a battle of good vs. evil. Light vs. darkness. Order vs. chaos. It always involves the disruption of our quiet normal lives. It is also a window into our cultural notions of good and evil and we can even see the evolution of these concepts over time.

In general I am going to address this in terms of the various theories that surround horror and to watch how these play out in written word and on the screen. The idea being that you, as consumers of good quality films and books, will learn to see these elements as they play out in front of you. And while I will present you with these elements, understand that most really great horror uses many of them, even if one is at the forefront. As an admission from the outset, I eschew the postmodern obsession with power relations politics, so you’re not going to see much of that sort of thing here. Because, to be brutally frank, politics poisons everything. Postmodern narrative theory is fascinating, postmodern textual analysis is simply dreadful. We’re having none of it here.

Horror is, whether literary or visual, the attempt of the artist to play off our fears. Fear of the unknown, fear of our subconscious, fear of fate, fear of inherited guilt, fear of reality. These are all things that writers, filmmakers, etc. play off of. In this first part we’re going to address the genre’s birth and how it exploited notions in the collective unconsciousness of readers for effect, and then look at this concept across time. The collective unconscious is a Jungian notion, the idea that as a species we share certain tokens (although as a European of the imperial age he assumed that the collective unconscious was populated by European tokens) that everyone understands. For the artist these tokens are available to summon because the readers, viewers, etc. will all immediately understand them. I don’t need to explain to the reader what a ghost is unless I am adding something novel to the concept.

The first real gothic horror in English was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, but he himself credited Shakespeare’s Hamlet as inspiration (and indeed much of what would become the horror genre can be seen in Hamlet, the dreadful hand of fate, insanity, and the inability of its principals to escape the inherited guilt of their crimes). Of course, Walpole built extensively atop it, creating much of what later writers would reuse (e.g. the mysterious noises, doors opening and closing unexpectedly, etc.).

Walpole’s tale scared readers with summoning of a ghost and adds in the array of special effects so that the ghost permeates the tale. While ghosts and eerie elements had always been part of literature, in Walpole’s work they become the story. Ghosts, witches, etc. in Shakespeare advance the story, in Walpole they were the story. To 18th century readers, for whom ghosts were a real phenomena, Walpole’s ghost story draws upon that token within his readers’ collective unconscious to scare them with a standard plot (a tale of past sins causing a character’s downfall).

You will see this in action throughout the horror genre, and you can even see it evolve. For example vampires, like ghosts before them, were once a figure of dread in the collective unconscious of western readers. Quite possibly because the vampire’s curse, at its heart, robs us of our humanity. After the vampire kills us we become undead, more animal than human. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula we see this in two characters, Mina Harker and Lucy. Mina, like Lucy before her, keeps becoming less human as the vampire’s spell deepens upon her. With Lucy the spiritual sickness of lost humanity manifests itself in a corresponding physical illness that ultimately (un)kills her. Mina Harker’s seeping humanity causes her to become semi-catatonic. She is barely able to function in a normal human way (and when she does she begs her protectors to not tell her their plans lest her tormentor hear them through her). We even see this same thing in Dracula himself at the end, when Quincy and Harker finally kill Dracula, Stoker’s description lets the reader know that in death Dracula has rediscovered a spark of his lost humanity. Because at the end he is happy to be freed from the curse.

“I’ve come to suck your…”

Contrast that with the vampire’s current place in our collective unconscious. The West’s slide into radical materialism and our desire for eternal youth has changed the vampire from a terrifying creature that represented our fear of losing our humanity into a romantic figure that holds the key to everything that we’re capable of wanting. This is not to say that there haven’t been attempts to restore vampires to their former place, but in the long run in modern vampire tales vampires are just human beings that drink blood and have eternal life.

Scottish author George MacDonald created the forerunner of the modern vampire tale, turning traditional vampire stories on their head in The Cruel Painter. In brief a painter named Teufelsbürst attempts to murder his daughter’s suitor, Karl. Karl survives the murder attempt and digs his way out of the grave in which Teufelsbürst lay him. Karl pretends to be a vampire in order to scare the father of his inamorata. But in reality the vampire is Teufelsbürst, who is sucking the life from his daughter and who himself has lost enough of his humanity that he could casually murder young Karl. But ultimately it’s Karl’s imitation vampire that redeems Teufelsbürst’s actual one. For under the fear of what he’s done the painter rediscovers his humanity and his goodness, and when he learns that Karl is still alive, he greets his future son-in-law with joy. Again, in our radically materialist epoch the salvation that the vampire has to bring is eternal youth and vitality, so in that sense our Twilight and Vampire Diaries culture has turned MacDonald on his head. The goal is no longer a return to moral health but the desire, like Peter Pan, to never grow old.

Today the traditional vampires have been largely displaced by zombies and aliens. (Alien, while ostensibly a science fiction movie, is really a horror film, hence the tagline No one can hear you scream in space.) Zombies now represent the curse of lost humanity, though we know they’re not real. In another sense they’re also a fitting replacement for the vampire in this radically materialist epoch, for zombies are the opposite of vampires. Whereas vampires are eternally young and vital zombies are disintegrating and decomposing. Whereas vampires are difficult to kill zombies can be slain with just about anything. Zombies represent us losing our humanity to age.

“Stop telling people that I’m Hillary Clinton’s cousin!”

Aliens carry that older power of the unknown that ghosts formerly did because, collectively, we humans suspect that we’re not alone in the universe. Just as our predecessors thought it entirely logical that our souls would linger behind us after death we believe it entirely logical that there are more intelligent races in the universe. This terrifies us because, collectively, we understand the horrors of colonialism (even if we can’t consciously admit them to ourselves). We know that aliens will treat humans the way Europeans treated Africans and Amerinds. So the token in our collective unconscious is used to scare us by reminding us of past guilt.

In this sense the now despised (by the legions of social justice warriors) H.P. Lovecraft is the first modern horror author. In a time when westerners believed that aliens lived within our own solar system he gave us aliens as the basis for horror literature, while still paying homage to the more traditional elements of the genre.

Cinematically we see this played out in the sheer number of horror/sci-fi mash ups. Such as John Carpenter’s The Thing, Ridley Scott’s first Alien film (the rest of the franchise tilted the balance to sci-fi), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the first two versions), Something Wicked This Way Comes (both the book and the movie, though it may be more fantasy), and John McTiernan’s Predator. All of these play on our fear of aliens arriving to colonize earth, because we know the process to be destructive, genocidal, and generally evil.

There is a corollary to the fear of aliens in the sci-fi/horror mashup, and that’s the fear of science or technology run amuck. While we as humans would generally agree that science is a net positive to our lives, history is littered with examples of progress run horribly awry. Science has given us fantastic medical cures, prolonged our lives, produced fantastic wealth, and even the technology that’s allowed me to reach you without going through a media gatekeeper. But we’ve also seen it at its worst, the building of weapons of mass destruction, the creation of technologies that produce horrific waste (true story, our nuclear waste problem was caused by the western desire to have nuclear plants that would produce material that could be recycled into WMDs rather than the option that produced power most efficiently or the least destructive waste). We’ve even watched science in service to state do unimaginably horrible things once it was divorced from morality.

These realities scare the bejesus out of us. And directors express this cinematically and literarily. In Japan, the victim of unimaginable horror in the form of two atomic bomb blasts, this fear of reality was expressed in a new breed of monster movie. The monsters of that golden age were, for the most part, mutated animals. Caused by radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

“We didn’t accidentally open up a gate to hell, nooooo. It was a gate to the circus, full of clowns, evil evil clowns that poke your eyes out…”

It’s also a common theme in the west, the first Terminator film is a horror/sci-fi/action mash-up. In Terminator our technology has come to life and is literally trying to kill us. The 28 franchise (28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later) is based around a chemical experiment gone horribly awry that produces super aggressive zombies (thus simultaneously accessing the lost humanity figure in the collective unconscious to warn us that science can steal our humanity just as easily as it improves our lives). You also see this in both versions of The Fly (ignore the sequels to both films, limit yourself to the Vincent Price original and the Jeff Goldblum remake) where the construction of a teleportation machine leads to a gene splicing terror. In Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon the scientists create a space ship with a trans-dimensional drive to permit intergalactic exploration. Only the drive accidentally opens a gate to a dimension that drives humans mad. Movies like Altered States, an update of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, plays upon these same fears as does Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, Boris Sagal’s Omega Man and much of the work of David Cronenberg.

The World War Z franchise can be seen as a sort of reaction to this trend, our lost humanity is a completely random thing generated by a plague like virus and only heroic scientists can restore us. But as zombie tales go they don’t carry very much fear and seem almost neocorny in their politics (so far off the neocon deep end that they devolve into absurdity). And not in a subtle way. In the cinema version Israel is saved from the zombie apocalypse by its apartheid wall, but it decides to admit Palestinians that haven’t been infected anyway. The grateful Palestinians sing hymns to Israel for saving them, and Israel’s reward for showing mercy is to be overrun by the zombie hordes. (“World War Z, mercy baaaad, science gooood”.)

“I’m not certain this is what I had in mind…”

I am going to close this section with a favorite film, a guilty pleasure which falls into the technology run amuck subgenre of horror and that vaults that into outright metaphysics. It’s David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which is a relentlessly dark musing on where video technology and our image-consciousness is taking us. Videodrome is a movie about an underground tv program called Videodrome. The evil of Videodrome is, literally, the television programming, which is sapping us of our humanity. The simple watching of the brutal sadomasochistic imagery of the show within the movie steals from its victims their normal humanity. Debbie Harry’s sexually adventurous doctor decides that she wants to be on the show and is murdered by it. James Woods’ sleazy television executive finds himself lost in surreal nightmares and is eventually programmed by the producers of the show to murder his coworkers. His salvation is to be reprogrammed by someone else.

It is a very early version of meta horror, where the horror is not only in the common element (in this case the fear of technology), but simultaneously a musing upon itself. It wants us to ask ourselves how we’re being changed by the transition to our new technological paradise and to look beyond the imagery designed to shock and sicken us. James Woods’ character represents the “next stage” of evolution that science had promised us, the change from homo sapiens to homo sapiens technicae. The notion that technology would improve the species. His final words to the camera are a chilling prayer to technology “Long live the new flesh”. The ensuing ending is as bleak as it gets, but in one sense the bleakness of the ending illustrates to us that the technology is ultimately a dead end. It can never make us whole no matter how much we might want it to.

Related

Written by

The Oscar Wilde of the information age and the last of the New England gentlemen. Unless, god forbid, he spawns. A Catholic anarchist & writer currently managing Satan's run for president (The Official Lesser Evil of 2016™). If you like his work, please consider buying one of his very funny tee shirts. See hisShopify store for updates.

Altar & Throne

Help Support Altar & Throne

Do you like what you're seeing here? Help support us to keep the content comin'!

Bitcoin:

Paypal:

Affiliate

Many of us here at Altar & Throne have had our horizons expanded through Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, and believe in and endorse this product. Join today to get the education you've never received before!